Bento Blogs

A common complaint about personal blogs is that they’re obsessive, self-referential, and narrow. They are, people say dismissively, about what the writer had for lunch. There is an arena in which that is manifestly, explicitly true: the world of bento blogs—blogs devoted to the Japanese art of arranging a lunchbox. There are online communities devoted to bento feats—contests for the execution of a theme, like “I love the 80s” and “Mario Bros”; there are Japanese housewife blogs; and North Americans like La Carmina, who espouses Gothic Lolita-style, or GothLoli, and is working on a book for Penguin that will be called “Cooking Cute.”

Since a post about cute stuff in Japan wouldn’t be complete without a mention of the mouthless cat, here are some stunning Hello Kitty bentos, an example of charaben (or kyaraben)—i.e. character bentos.

The 3-D scene—post-bento, you could say—was documented last spring in the food section of the New York Times.

Dana Goodyear, a staff writer, was on the editorial staff of The New Yorker from 1999 to 2007, when she began writing full time for the magazine.